Reran cabling between a stack of switches and patch panels that had been abused by multiple vendors over the course of 2-3 years.

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The spaghetti pile, as it was known, was a major eyesore as you walked into the server room. There was no way you could miss it, and it looked quite embarrassing and unprofessional. The cabling between a stack of switches and patch panels had been abused by multiple vendors over the course of 2-3 years. My colleague and I have been here almost a year and were tasked with several cleanup projects, this being one of them. Redressing cables isn't too difficult, but we needed to make sure that we routed all cables to the appropriate port and avoid any bad jacks (we were told there were several but none had been physically identified)

Several cables going to important equipment were also tangled up in the spaghetti pile. It had gotten to the point that several cables were pinched from being squeezed through different openings and would need to be replaced.

My colleague and I measured out cable sizes needed to make the runs from the panels to the switches and ordered new cables and smaller conduits to allow room for additional panels/switches. As time allowed, we re-positioned the panels and switches to allow for cleaner cable runs - not an easy task considering that everything was extremely tangled combined with tight cable runs on the back of the panels.

Once the new cables and conduit arrived and the equipment was positioned where we wanted, we setup a maintenance window on a Saturday night and went to work, carefully replacing and dressing the new cables (totaling around 220 separate connections.

The end result was a much cleaner look with reliable cabling, and received a lot of praise from our boss and the CEO. It wasn't a huge project, but I kept pushing forward because it created value. The cleanup allowed us to identify other issues that we didn't catch due to the mess, and served as a kick off point for future cleanup and growth of the server room infrastructure.